CFP: Newberry Library Symposium (May, 2024)

Call for Papers: Newberry Library Symposium on Animality in pre-modern Jewish art and culture.

Graduate students and early career scholars are invited to send in paper abstracts for a two-day symposium on animality in pre-modern, and particularly medieval, Jewish art and culture. The symposium, which will take place at the Newberry Library in Chicago on May 14-15, 2024 (just after the ICMS at Kalamazoo), will address a plethora of topics, including cosmic ecologies and their continuities across the animal-human-divine-demonic spectrum, collisions — visual and textual — between humanities and animalities; bestialization as a heuristic; animalization of Jews in Jewish and Christian discourses; zoocephaly in material and literary sources; monstrosities and hybridities as sites of wonder and liminality. We have already assembled a cohort of established scholars in the fields of Art History and Judaic Studies to speak at the symposium, and our hope is to include some new voices as well.


Please submit a C.V. and 250 word abstract by August 15th to the organizers:
Elina Gertsman exg152@case.edu
Julie Harris marfiles@comcast.net
David Shyovitz davidshy@northwestern.edu


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Julie Harris (March 20, 2022). CFP: Newberry Library Symposium (May, 2024). medievalJewishStudiesNow! Retrieved April 21, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/rhmd


About Julie Harris

Julie Harris is a specialist in the art of medieval Iberia. She has published on ivory carving, the fate of art and architecture during the Reconquest, and illuminated Hebrew manuscripts. She has participated in three of Therese Martin’s international research projects: “Reassessing the Role of Women as Makers” the “Treasury of San Isidoro in León,” and the ongoing “Medieval Iberian Treasury in Context: Collections, Connections, and Representations on the Peninsula and Beyond.” Her recent publications have appeared in Gesta, the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, Medieval Encounters, Journal of Medieval History and Abstraction in Medieval Art: Beyond the Ornament, edited by Elina Gertsman (AUP, 2021). She was recently awarded a Center for Spain in America fellowship at the Clark Institute for her project on the decorative Carpet pages of Iberian Hebrew Bibles.